Chapter 26
The drawing rooms of London had always felt like theater to Genevieve.
All performance, all artifice, all careful smiles arranged like flowers in a vase that everyone knew would wilt by morning.
She had understood that instinctively from her very first season, had learned to navigate the choreography of it with something approaching grace.
She had believed, perhaps naively, that marriage would lift her above the worst of it. That having a husband, a household, a name of her own would afford her some small measure of shelter from the whispers that circulated like weather through every gathering.
She had been wrong.
The weeks following Clarissa's return to society had ground themselves into Genevieve with the slow, deliberate patience of water wearing stone.
There was no single catastrophic blow, no confrontation, no public scene, nothing so merciful as that.
Instead, it came in accumulations. A titter here, a glance there.
A fan raised just a fraction too quickly at the sight of her. A hush that fell over a cluster of women the moment she stepped within earshot, followed by a resumption of conversation that was just slightly too bright, too innocent, too deliberately cheerful.
She knew what they were saying. She did not need to hear the words to understand them.
Thomas and Clarissa. Clarissa and Thomas.
The names linked together like a chain, passed from drawing room to drawing room, from morning call to evening assembly, acquiring new embellishments with every telling until whatever kernel of truth or speculation sat at the center of it had been buried entirely beneath layers of invention.
The cruelest instrument of her suffering was Lydia Hargrove, who had always possessed a gift for malice that she dressed in the costume of candor. Lydia was one of those women who delivered wounds with an expression of such wide-eyed concern that one could almost believe she meant well. Almost.
If one did not look too closely at the pleasure lurking behind her eyes.
At the Wentworth musicale, Lydia had placed herself just behind Genevieve's chair for the entire first half of the program, and though Genevieve could not make out every word exchanged in those low, intimate murmurs, she had caught enough.
Enough to know her name, enough to know Clarissa's, enough to understand the vague outline of what was being said.
She had sat very straight in her chair that evening, fixed her eyes on the performer at the pianoforte.
That was what it had become: a performance of her own.
A daily, hourly exercise in composure. She rose in the mornings and selected her gowns with care, arranged her hair, and descended to breakfast wearing the face she had decided to wear.
Perhaps today she could be pleasant, or serene, or maybe unbothered?
When she had chosen, she kept that face in place through the long hours of the day and into the evenings and did not permit herself to let it slip until she was finally, mercifully, alone.
The worst of it was not the gossip itself, she had come to realize. The gossip she might have endured. She had sufficient pride and sufficient stubbornness to have weathered even that, had it remained purely external … had it been only the cruelty of others she was required to contend with.
What she could not so easily withstand was the small, insidious doubt that had taken up residence inside her own chest.
Because this was the thought she turned away from most fiercely whenever it surfaced, because to look at it directly was almost more than she could bear… what if they were not entirely wrong?
She had fallen in love with Thomas quickly.
More quickly than she had ever admitted to anyone, certainly more quickly than was wise, and in retrospect, she could see how the speed of it had blinded her.
She had been so busy being grateful for his kindness, so absorbed in the sweetness of finding that she liked him, not merely found him acceptable, that she had not examined the situation with the rigor it deserved.
She had not asked herself the harder questions.
She had simply felt, and followed feeling, and called it happiness.
Had she been naive? She turned the question over and over in the privacy of her own thoughts, examining it from every angle, and she could not arrive at a comfortable answer.
She was not a foolish woman. She knew this about herself with some certainty.
But love had a particular talent for making otherwise sensible people overlook what they would rather not see.
Thomas had loved Clarissa once. This was not in dispute. Everyone knew it, had known it for years; it had been the great romantic narrative of two seasons, the attachment that everyone had believed would end in marriage. Until it abruptly—scandalously—had not.
And then Genevieve had married him and everything had seemed perfectly settled. She had allowed herself to believe that the past was the past and that what they were building together was its own thing, entire and sufficient.
And now Clarissa was back.
Caroline arrived without warning, as she had taken to doing.
Genevieve heard her in the hallway before she saw her.
The brightness of her voice as she handed off her things to the maid, the sound of someone who had decided in advance that the visit would go well and saw no reason to revise this position.
She appeared in the doorway of the sitting room still pulling off her gloves, already talking.
"There is an exhibition," she announced, "at the Whitmore Gallery, and I have decided we are going tomorrow. I have already decided. You need not argue."
"I was not going to argue."
"Good, because I have a great deal more to say and arguing would take time.
" Caroline dropped into the chair across from her with the unselfconscious ease of someone very comfortable in other people's houses.
"It's landscapes, mostly, but there are two portraits I have been told are extraordinary, and I want your opinion on them because you always notice things I do not. "
"Do I?"
"You do. You once told me the woman in that painting at the Ashworths' looked like she was about to say something she would regret, and I have never been able to look at it any other way since." She tilted her head. "Tomorrow, then. I will collect you at two."
Genevieve looked at her. Caroline looked back, her expression arranged in an attitude of perfect innocence that did not quite conceal the attention underneath it. She was watching, carefully, kindly, in the way she had been watching for weeks now.
"And Friday," Caroline continued, producing this with the air of someone who had been saving it, "I have been meaning to go to Madame Elliot's for an absolute age. My hat situation has become dire. You would be doing me a genuine kindness."
"Your hat situation has never once been dire."
"It is now. It's a crisis, Genevieve! And I cannot face it alone." She paused. "Say you will come."
"Caroline—"
"And on Saturday I am having a few people for cards. Only a few. The Delafields, and the Moores, and perhaps Charlotte if she is back from her sister's." A careful little pause. "No one else."
Genevieve understood. She understood the exhibition and the milliner's and the very small, very particular guest list on Saturday, and she understood what all of it meant, the weeks of it, the steady, unrelenting effort of it, and she found she did not have the words for what she felt about it, which was something so warm it was almost painful.
"You do not have to do this," she said.
"I am not doing anything," Caroline said, with great firmness. "I want to see the portraits. My hats are suffering. And I like cards." She met Genevieve's eyes. "Thursday at two."
Genevieve looked at her for a moment longer.
"Thursday at two."
Caroline smiled, a real one, unguarded, the kind she did not always show in company, and reached over to squeeze her hand once, briefly, before releasing it and changing the subject entirely, talking about something inconsequential and cheerful, and not once mentioning anything that mattered.
It was, Genevieve thought, one of the kindest things she had ever witnessed. Genevieve was grateful. She was also, in some part of herself she could not quite reach, entirely unreachable.
After Caroline left, the sitting room felt different.
Not worse, just quieter, in the way that spaces feel quiet after someone warm has been in them.
Genevieve sat for a while without moving, her hands in her lap, and looked at the chair Caroline had occupied and thought about Thursday at two, and the portraits, and the hat situation that was not and had never been a crisis, and felt the warmth of it and the distance from it simultaneously.
That was the trouble. She could feel that Caroline loved her, could feel it clearly, could receive it and be grateful for it, and it still could not reach the place where the doubt lived. It was like holding a candle up to a wall. The candle was real. The light was real. The wall remained.
She wished she did not feel such a seemingly ever-present gloom or malaise. It had somehow soaked into all of her thoughts, like ink spreading over parchment.
“You are not smiling,” Lady Harrington said from the door. Genevieve startled and looked at her.
“I do apologize, I did not hear you—”
“I have not seen you smile that infuriating smile in some days now,” she continued.
“Does one need to constantly smile?” Genevieve asked.
“If you had asked me that some months ago I would have said no,” the older woman sighed. “But on you, a frown is truly unnatural.”
Genevieve hesitated. Then she tried to smile but it did not reach her eyes.
“Like this?”
“No, no, no,” she sighed. “A false smile is worse than no smile.”
“But then how can I—?”